1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer software. More particularly, the present invention relates to software for processing technical data, such as measurement data.
2. Description of the Relevant Art
Technical Data Management may include a large collection of functionality and operations performed by different applications and services in handling, processing and managing technical data from measurements, simulations, and other applications in the operations of an engineering or scientific enterprise, company or department. The operations include but are not limited to storing and retrieving technical data; exploring, searching and filtering datasets in a technical data depository for use in other applications; managing technical data, datasets, data bases and data depositories; selecting technical data for use by other people; importing and exporting from other systems not directly integrated into the TDM solution; and supporting network operations for all of these services. Technical data management is a very complex problem and no one product solves all of these requirements.
The field of Technical Data Management (TDM) may include computer-based tools for acquiring, storing, and retrieving measurement data in an efficient and accurate way. As used herein, measurement data may include data acquired by a test and measurement application, e.g., via test and measurement hardware, such as data acquisition (DAQ) hardware or other hardware.
In TDM, it may be useful to store meta-data which describes the measurement data. Current solutions have bundled the meta-data and the measurement data to provide self-describing measurement data. For example, the Open Data Services (ODS) standard of the Association for Standardization of Automation and Measuring Systems (ASAM) specifies details for representations of the measurement and description data is used in the automotive industry. ASAM-ODS generally defines a data model architecture (a method to describe the organization of data in a data source) and general methods to access data sources.
An ASAM-ODS server is a database-oriented implementation of ASAM-ODS data storage. Generally, relational databases serve as the basis for ASAM-ODS servers, but implementations on object-oriented databases also exist. The server provides data storage functionality to ASAM-ODS compliant clients. In addition, the server provides the ODS API (AOP¾ ASAM ODS Protocol version ¾) and stores data in such a way that the data can be handled in an ODS-compliant data model by a client through the API.
An ATF (ASAM Transport Format) file, an ASCII representation of the ASAM-ODS data and data model, facilitates the exchange of data between different ASAM-ODS storage systems or other external systems. Measurement data (bulk data) can also be stored in binary files and linked to the ATF file.
Existing solutions for storing self-describing measurement data may have several drawbacks. For example, in distributed computer systems having multiple networked computers, finding the location of the stored data may be troublesome. Furthermore, the data format(s) of the stored data may vary. Even where solutions to these problems exist, the solutions may require customized programming for each application that desires to access the stored data. The necessity for custom code results in a system that is expensive to develop, often difficult to maintain, often difficult to use, and not scalable.
Various TDM applications (such as those available from National Instruments Corporation) may be used to make measurements and then store them or fetch measurements for analysis and visualization. There are ways to store and retrieve data from each. Having one application store data in one place and another application obtain the data from the stored location is the core of current TDM systems. FIG. 1 (prior art) represents technical data management as performed today. Each application is independently responsible for storing and retrieving data.
The various TDM applications can read and write to similar storage mechanisms such as files or databases. This capability makes it possible to build TDM solutions, but it burdens the developer of the application acquiring the data and those developing the visualization and analysis applications with maintaining a consistent data representation. At the very least, this capability requires the various applications to share understanding of how the measurement is represented. This solution does not scale well to TDM applications in large corporations or communities. This solution imposes the burden and cost of coordination on all the applications.
Therefore, systems and methods for technical data management are desired to reduce the difficulty and complexity of using and building these TDM systems.